With SpreadsheetWeb, you can transform your timesheet spreadsheets into web applications and configure workflows with the new ‘Tag’ feature!
In this article, we will take a fictitious company using a timesheet application for their employees to log their weekly work hours. Their employees were using an Excel-based timesheet spreadsheet before. With SpreadsheetWeb, this company converted their Excel-based spreadsheet into a web-based application. They also need a way to automate its approval mechanism with a workflow for managers to review and approve created timesheets. We will show you how you can use tags to automate this approval mechanism, manage the access to timesheets and how to configure a workflow to manage the lifecycle of a timesheet.
This company’s employees log their working hours in a timesheet everyday and submit it to their manager when they are done at the end of the week. The manager reviews timesheets weekly; they approve them or notify employees back to revise timesheets.
In such a case, you must first create a tag for both roles, we created them as ‘Employee’ and ‘Manager ‘.
We will also configure a workflow to manage a timesheet from its creation to completion. To do this, create tags indicating the stages for the ’Timesheet Status’. We have created the following 4 stages; you can name these stages as you use them within the company.
- New
- Pending Review
- Accepted
- Revision Needed
The next step after creating the tags is to create Identity Templates to determine the access, editing and viewing permissions of the Manager and Employees the workspace. You can follow these steps to create identity templates:
1. Creating an Identity Template for Employees:
- Select the appropriate user role tag in Workspace Rights > Is Associated With
- Make sure at least Read-only Access to All Applications is selected for Application Rights.
- Add Edit Access to Application Data by Tag in Data Rights. Add the tags relevant with the user role. For example, an employee can edit a record only if the record is in New or Revision Needed state.
- Add Read-only Access to Application Data by Tag as well if you want to allow your employees to see their entries but not be able to edit. Add the tags for read-only right.
2. Creating an Identity Template for Managers:
- Select the appropriate user role tag in Workspace Rights > Is Associated With
- Make sure at least Read-only Access to All Applications is selected for Application Rights.
- Add Edit Access to Application Data by Tag in Data Rights. Add the tags relevant with the user role. For example, an employee can edit a record only if the record is in Pending Review or Accepted state.
Tip: If you want your managers to be able to see each record, just add Edit Access to All Application Data instead.
- Add Read-only Access to Application Data by Tag as well if you want to allow your employees to see their entries but not be able to edit. Add the tags for read-only right.
After creating the Identity Templates, you can invite users to your workspace. You can select Identity Templates while inviting them to the workspace.
When invited users approve their workspace invitation, their workspace permissions specified for the selected template will be applied to their accounts.
To use Timesheet Status while creating new timesheet records, you need to modify the Excel File related with your application and add Timesheet Status options with formulas and named ranges for the UI input, which will help to maintain the workflow process.
- IsSubmitted: A TRUE/FALSE field that determines if the timesheet is ready to be reviewed. An employee can make this TRUE if he/she is done with the week.
- IsManager: A formula that is checking if the user has "Manager" tag.
- IsApproved: A TRUE/FALSE field for the manager. Updates the Status field as either "Approved" or "Revision Needed", identical texts with tag names.
- Status: A formula that returns the name of the tag to be assigned to the record. For example, if IsSubmitted is TRUE by employee and the manager marks the IsApproved as FALSE, the formula returns "Revision Needed".
Save your file and go back to your SpreadsheetWeb Hub Applications page, open the Designer, and update the application’s UI according to your needs. Make sure to add new fields as a data field to preserve their state in the database as well.
You can follow these steps while updating the application’s UI:
- Add IsSubmitted and IsApproved fields as checkbox control. You can choose a toggle view as well.
- You can decide which controls will be visible for certain users. Such as the Revision button and Approve Hours? toggle should be hidden for employees. You can set this type of condition by binding the Visibility property of control with a TRUE/FALSE named range.
- Tags can be assigned to records in several ways. You can see the options after adding Save event to a button:
- By selecting tag(s) directly as we will do for the Revision button
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- By selecting a named range that returns tag name(s) like in Save button:
- Optionally, you can create an Email event to notify the Manager when the timesheet is ready for reviewing (submitted).
To create an Email event, follow these steps:
Go to the Email module by following Dial Menu > Events > Email path.
Click Add an Email Process button to set your email up. Make sure change Enabled property to "By Value Of" to bind the email event into a submit condition ("IsSubmitted"). You can configure the rest of the options as your needs.
Once the Email process is added, do not forget to go back to User Interface and add the ‘Email’ event into the Save button.
Do not forget to Publish your application to apply all changes.
After the application is published, created records will be displayed with the relevant Tags in application’s data page. The lifecycle of a timesheet from its creation to completion will be as follows:
- Employee opens the application and enters times daily. At the end of each day, they click on Save. Those timesheets will be displayed with the ‘’New’’ tag in the data page.
2.When the week is ended, the employee checks the Submit? checkbox and click Save to submit timesheet. This action will lock the record for the employee and will notify the Manager with an email if you have added an Email event. Those timesheets will be displayed with the ‘Pending Review’ tag in the data page.
3. The Manager logs in to their SpreadsheetWeb Hub account and opens the data to review. (Manager View of the application with the Revision button and Approve Hours? Toggle will be displayed.)
4. While the manager is reviewing the timesheet,
- If everything is good, Manager should make the toggle "ON" and click Save button to finalize the process. Those timesheets will be displayed with the ‘Accepted’ tag in the data page.
- If a revision is needed, the Manager should click on the Revision button which converts the record's tag into "Revision Needed".
Also, managers and employees can use the Chat feature to point out what needs to be reviewed. All they need is to click on the ‘Chat’ button located under ‘Actions’ column.
This will open a chat window, managers and employees that has access to that specific record can notify each other, share opinions or have conversations about the record.
In SpreadsheetWeb Hub, you can use Tags to determine user roles, and manage user rights within your workspace. In addition, for your applications, you can create tags related to your internal approval processes to automate the workflow, and always stay up to date.
