Project Accounting Timesheet Recalc Version 2 Released

Based on a customer request, I have added new functionality to my Project Accounting Timesheet Recalc Utility and have released Version 2.0.

The PA Timesheet Recalc utility is useful for Dynamics GP customers who use Project Accounting Timesheets for salaried employees.

The salaried employees have fixed payroll costs, but if they work more or less than the standard number of hours in a given pay period, the project timesheet costs posted to the general ledger will not match the actual payroll expenses for the employee.

Some companies ignore this discrepancy, some companies post a summary adjustment to correct the difference, and others try and manually adjust the costs on each Project Accounting timesheet to try and get the total to match the employee payroll amount. Each of these has its own challenges that make them less than ideal.

The PA Timesheet Recalc utility adjusts the unit costs on PA timesheets so that the amounts match the employee payroll exactly. It averages the unit cost based on the hours entered on the timesheet, handles the rounding issues caused by the average cost calculation, and also recalculates the timesheet distributions.

The initial version of PA Timesheet Recalc was designed for companies whose employees submitted a single timesheet for the entire pay period. In this situation, the total timesheet cost would always equal the employee pay, plus any overhead.

However, some companies have employees submit multiple timesheets during the pay period. For companies that wish to have the timesheets routed and approved by different managers responsible for different projects, employees may have to submit a separate timesheet each day for each project.

To accomodate this requirement, PA Timesheet Recalc Version 2 can now recalculate multiple timesheets for a given employee for any date range. For example, if an employee submits 20 timesheets for the period of January 16 - January 30, the utility summarizes all timesheets to determine the appropriate average cost and recalculates all of the timesheets. The user is able to specify the date range, and select multiple employees to include in the recalculation process.



PA Timesheet Recalc is definitely a niche product, but for those companies that are using Project Accounting Timesheets and trying to get their project costs to match their payroll expenses, it can be a significant time saver.

Since it is somewhat difficult to explain and understand, I've posted an updated video demo of the product.

Project Accounting Timesheet Costs

Recently Steve and I have been working on a customization project to address one of my ongoing "sticking points" when using project accounting timesheets for salaried employees. It is one of those issues that bugs me enough that I routinely have to turn to others...other project accounting consultants, trainers, MS support folks, etc to give myself a reality check :)

So what is the issue? Well, let's work through the following example...

• Employee 1 is a salaried employee making $1000 per weekly pay period, making their hourly rate $25/hr based on 2080 hrs/year
• Let's assume that the pay period is the same as the timesheet report period (weekly)
• Employee records 45 hrs on their timesheet for the week

When the timesheet posts, it will post 45 hrs of cost to the project at $25/hr -- $1125. This $1125 also posts in the general ledger:

• $1125 Debit to Work in Progress or Cost of Goods Sold/Expense as appropriate
• $1125 Credit to Contra Account for Costs

The intention of this is that it records the project-related expense, and is then offset with the salary expense when it is recorded via payroll or a journal entry. Of course, do we all see the issue with the example above? $1125 of cost is recorded, although we are only going to pay the fabulous Employee A $1000/pay period. So we are effectively overstating the cost on the project and in the general ledger.

The customization we are working on resets the unit cost on the timesheet. So, in the example above it would do the following:

• $1000 pay/45 total hours = $22.22
• Reset unit cost per line on timesheet to $22.22
• Reset distributions so that $1000 is debited to WIP (or COGS/Exp) and credited to Contra account

It should work, and will save clients a lot of frustration. I just laugh at myself that I didn't think to rope Steve in to it sooner. Now let's not even talk about what would happen if the pay period and timesheet reporting period were not the same!