Employees

NetSuite can be used to track employee time, and manage expense reports, and we’ll look at how to do that in this video. Most of the transactional information you can track for employees is listed under Transactions and Employees. This includes things like Expense Reports and Time Tracking. There are a few other things you can track for certain employees, such as commissions, which are not listed here, and we will cover those in just a moment. There really isn’t a lot more though, that you can track with native NetSuite out of the box. You can’t track vacation hours for example. You could use custom records or fields to do this and to calculate this on the employee record, but that is something we won’t be covering here. If we chose Enter Expense Reports here, we can enter an employee expense report. Entering an expense report is also something that can be accessed both from the NetSuite mobile app, and from the employee center role. Since I am logged in as an administrator, I can enter expense reports for any user I choose, however most roles will not have this permission. They will therefore have either their name as the only name they can select, or it will default in. I’ll go ahead and choose myself here. I can type a purpose for this expense report, I’ll enter SuiteWorld 2017 Expenses. I can enter a date for this, but the default is fine for now. I am also going to uncheck this Complete, checkbox. The complete checkbox is what triggers the expense report to be sent to my expense approver. The expense approver can be found on the employee record. If there is no expense approver the default is to go to the employee’s supervisor for approval. I’ll go ahead and enter a meal I had at SuiteWorld. First, I’ll select a category of Meals & Entertainment. Since I paid this in my native currency, US Dollars in this case, I will enter the amount in the Amount field, how about $20. If I had paid this in a foreign currency I would enter the amount in the Foreign Amount field. No matter what currency I use, I have to select the currency I used from the Currency dropdown list here, so I’ll select USA. I could also put a memo in the memo field, something like “Fast food with John”. If I want to I can choose a department, class and location for this expense, I could mark this as billable, and I could attach a file from the file cabinet. I don’t actually recommend attaching a file this way though. If you want to attach a file I recommend installing and using the File Drag and Drop bundle, so that you can drag and drop files directly to the record. This way they are put in the correct location. I’ll click Add to add this line to my expense report. I’ll also click Save to save the expense report. Just because I have saved it, does not mean it has been submitted for approval. This expense report is still in progress and I can see that by looking at the status up here. Un-checking the complete checkbox is what allows me to come back to this expense report and add anything else I need before submitting it. I’ll go ahead and click Edit again to go into editing mode for this report. So maybe I decided that the expense report is done and ready to submit. I can check the complete checkbox, then click Save, and the expense report has now been submitted for approval. Using the default approval process my expense approver will receive an email request to approve this expense report. That person will then need to open this report, and hopefully approve the expenses. NetSuite can also be used to track time. I can either enter a single time tracking entry by going to Transactions, Employees and Track Time, or I can enter multiple times by clicking weekly time tracking. Let’s open the Weekly Time Tracking. Time tracking in NetSuite is really designed to track time that can be billed to customers for work you have performed. So, this might be useful in a mechanics shop, consulting firm, or somewhere like that. Generally speaking however, most companies do not use NetSuite to track employee time the way you would using a traditional time clock. You certainly can do this, but there isn’t really a good way to have employees punch in and out. If you really wanted to do this I would recommend either using the single time entry or setting up a custom record. You could also setup a custom screen where employees can clock in and out, and have that trigger the creation of the time clock entries, but all of these are more than what we will cover in this video. Because I am the employee entering the times, my name defaults in the employee field. If I am entering time for myself, this is fine, but if I was entering time for someone else I would change the employee with the dropdown menu. I can select a customer this job is for. We’ll pick John Jensen. If there were a case, task or event I was working on for him I could enter that here. I could just as easily select a Service Item. I can also have both of these, if that makes sense. I’ll pick this BUR01 service item here. I can also add a memo, something like “Mr. Jensen called for support with his printer. I can select if this is billable or not, in this case I will leave it as billable. Like most other transactions, I can enter a department, class and location, and for my instance of NetSuite I have to enter a location so I’ll set one. I can also enter a time in hours and minutes. I’ll just put an hour here on Sunday. Now I’ll click Add. I could add as many lines as I need, and could track my time for the entire week, but I’m just going to enter this one. I’ll click Save. This is now waiting on approval. When the time is approved, this can be used to automatically generate an invoice or sales order for John Jensen so he will be billed for the time that was spent working on his problem. To approve the time, my supervisor, or another user with the appropriate permissions, would need to go to the approve time screen, which is located under Transactions, Employees and Approve Time. Here we can see time entries that are waiting to be approved, including the one we just created. You can approve time entries from here by selecting them and clicking the approve button. If you want to you can also drill down into any of the specific time entries here by clicking on the date, this will take you to that specific time entry. If you are wondering why I can approve all of these, including the one I just created, it’s because I’m an administrator. The last type of employee transactions that are used often are commissions. Commissions are how you pay employees for specific work done, or sales made. We don’t have the time to go into them in depth here because they can get pretty complex, and covering commissions could honestly take its own chapter, but let’s take an overview look. If we go to Transactions, then Commissions, we can see a number of actions we can take, such as Authorizing and Approving them for Employees and Partners. Before you do any of that though you have to setup a commission schedule, and setup commission plans. Those are setup under Lists, Commissions, and then the appropriate partner or employee, and schedule or plan. Let’s open each of these in a new tab. Commission schedules are fed into commission plans, so let’s take a look at the schedules first. Here we can see the schedules we already have, or we could create a new schedule. Let’s take a look at this first schedule, percent of sales transactions. Most of the fields we see here in edit mode are the same as what we would see if we were creating a new schedule. If we click on the Commissions On field dropdown we can see that there are several options we have, to pay commission on, and in this case, we are using sales. We would have more options if we were creating a new schedule. We can select the eligible amount in this dropdown, and there are a few choices here as well. This commission schedule feeds into a plan, so let’s take a look at that. If we come over to our commission plans, browser tab we can edit this plan, percent sales plus shipping. Here we can see where we assign the schedules to the plan and where we assign the sales reps to the plan. Using a variety of schedules and plans you can create some very complex commissions structures. Once you have those commission structures in place you would go back to Transactions, Commissions and then select Authorize, then Approve to pay out commissions. There is more to commissions, but that is better suited for a course later on, or at least not an introductory one such as this.