Q. Does your product allow the setup of multiples users to bill time to multiple projects? Also, can you adjust the hourly billable rate for users? Keep in mind that users' billable hourly rate may change accross different projects. Can this be set easily. For example, Consultant A bills $50/hour for Project A and $80/hour for Project B OR Consultant A bills $50 for task 1 and $70 for task 2, both of which are for Project A.

A. Yes, our product supports different charge rates across different projects and tasks. Basically, you create projects for your clients and then create tasks under projects to form Project-Task codes (i.e. Charge Codes). Each Charge Code has a charge rate associated with it. Then you assign your users (employees, consultants, etc.) to different Charge Codes. So you will have different charge rates for your employees for different Projects/Tasks.

Q. Can I view totals based on entered user hours by day, week, month, quarter, and year? Totals should be displayed for client, client project, project task, and should also be viewable by user and/or department either as a total or referenced against a specific client/project/task.

A. Yes, NetConsole/Timesheet comes with reporting functions for billing and invoicing based on Project, Charge Codes, Time Periods, Employees. In addition, each reporting module comes with an Ad-Hoc capability, which allows the user to dynamically generate reports based on selected criteria.

Q. It appears that each employee has a certain set of charge codes established beforehand. Is it possible to have codes available in a pull down menu? In my organization, we literally have hundreds of valid charge codes and a few employees using 10-15 different codes per pay period. Is this something the timesheets can handle?

A. Yes, all the Charge Codes are defined by your System Administrator using the Project Manager module. Once you've created Charge Codes, you simply assign Groups to them. If you assign your users to multiple groups, they will be able to see all the charge codes associated with their groups. All the projects and their charge codes are organized in two drop-down menus for selection in the Enter Timesheet function. You will find detailed instructions in our online step-by-step Tutorial in the product.

Q. Does NetConsole/Timesheet integrate with any accounting apps?

A. Yes. We have a direct ADP output to ADP Payroll for Windoes. You can output ADP reports in ASCII text file or in Excel. Besides ADP, we do provide standard Timesheet data output in text format, in Excel, and in XML formats. You can take these outputs and import into your own accounting packages, or you can copy and paste these output to Excel spreadsheet and do additional modification and then output from there.

Q. What kind of reports can NetConsole prepare ? what modules do we need to buy in NetConsole for reporting and exporting data ?

A. NetConsole has a comprehensive set of dynamic report generators and a set of can reports to help you in preparing your Timesheet, Billing and Payroll reports, as well as data outputs for integration with other applications. Basically, you can run reports for Clients by Projects, by Tasks, by Users, by Groups and by any random Time Periods, or any combination of above. All the Timesheet and Project/Task reporting capability are under Timesheet, Billing and Payroll modules, so I would strongly recommend that you purchase the Billing/Payroll module as well if you wish to run reports and export data.

Timesheet module comes with TS Report-Employees, TS Report-Supervisors, employee vacation plan ,as well as an Output Timesheet function (under SysAdmin module), where you can retrieve each user's Timesheets and output Timesheet data in either comma-separated text files, Excel or XML data file.

If you are using ADP Payroll system, or need to output data for Payroll process, you can use our Payroll module to output ADP reports and manipulate from there. Our ADP output provides a direct feed to ADP for windows, but you can run ADP outputs and modify into the format you need for your own payroll applications.

Q. Does Timesheet allow for multiple currency conversion?

A. NetConsole/Timesheet is blind to currency, which means for whatever dollar amount is entered, NetConsole will simply reflect the calculation in the total. We are able to customize the application to change the dollar sign to any other currency symbol you specify.

Q. Does Timesheet allow for languages other than English?

A. All the menu bar items (Modules and Functions) are text fields which you can change to any language that you want. For example, under SysAdmin, Access Control, Module Manager, you can change the menu items to any language you like. For the rest of the areas, we will need to customize them for you.

Q. What is the difference between the full version and the Timsheet only version?

A. Full version contains all of the modules, including Timesheet, Billing/Payroll, Expense Report, ECR, etc. The Timesheet only version refers to Timesheet module only.

Q. Are the Timesheet periods definable (e.g. weekly, biweekly, etc)? How about Week Begin Day ?

A. Our new v3.5 is for weekly Timesheet entry only. However, you can randomly select any number of time periods to generate reports. The week starting day is configurable though, you can select any week day (Sunday, Monday, or Wednesday) as you week beginning day.

Q. Assume that a company has your system for, say, 5 years. Does the Ad-Hoc reporting tool work this far back to get code information, project information across all of the past years?

A. Yes. NetConsole/Timesheet is built upon an open database environment, which means all data is stored in database tables in the backend database (i.e. SQL 7 or Oracle 8). You can backup, restore and manipulate the data as you normally would for your database administration tasks. If you archive your TS database every year, then after 5 years, you will need to aggregate all 5 databases together before you run 5-year billing reports since the reporting programs are querying against one single TS table.

Q. Is there some form of automated reminder (with possible escalation to managers) for users who missed filling out "x" weeks worth of timesheets or whose timesheets have not been approved?

A. See previous answer.

Q. Is it possible to get rid of the pop-ups for comments and "send e-mail" when submitting a timesheet?

A. Currently, this is unsupported by this version. However, We will be adding a short cut to avoid Comment Box and E-mail Forms in our future releases.

Q. Does the e-mail notification use your e-mail module only, or does it integrate with other e-mail apps? We're using Outlook.

A. NetConsole/Timesheet uses any specified SMTP mail server to send out e-mails to your users for all Email Reminders, Late Timesheet Notices and Approve/Disapprove Notices. Your users will receive their TS reminders and notices using their regular e-mail apps, like Outlook. You are not using NetConsole/Timesheet to receive e-mails, NetConsole/Timesheet only sends out e-mails.

Q. Do you have E-mail notification?

A. NetConsole/Timesheet has Email Reminder, Late TS Notice, Disapproval Notice and Group Email which can be sent to your clients and employees.

Q. Please explain the e-mail notification system. Is it entirely manual or can the system automatically send e-mail notifcations to users who haven't submitted their timesheets?

A. There are three kinds of "E-mail Notfication Systems" in NetConsole/Timesheet. They are:

E-mail Notice - When you submit your Timesheets, or when supervisors approve, disapprove or undo approved employees' Timesheets, you will have an option to send out E-mail Notices to your supervisors or to your employees.

E-mail Reminder - You can schedule E-mail Reminder to send out at a specified day and time (every Friday at noon, for example), to remind your employees to enter and submit their Timesheets. Also you can schedule a date and time (say, every Monday at 8:00am) to send out E-mail Reminders to your supervisors to approve their subordinates' Timesheets. We have also the "Late Timesheet E-mail Reminder" where you can set up a date and time to be the "deadline" for the Timesheet submission (say Saturday at 12:00PM). NetConsole's system will automatically pick up those employees who forget to submit their Timesheets by the deadline.

Group E-mail - You can send Group E-mails to all or selected Employees, or you can send out Group E-mails to all or selected Clinets.

Q. Can we query the underlying database tables ourselves? Can we extract the data we need without purchasing that module?

A. NetConsole is based on Open Database Structure (SQL server), where you have a full access to all the tables you need. So, of course, you are able to retrieve your Timesheet data directly from the Timesheet tables. You don't need to buy Billing/Payroll module to have this access.