Shop Floor Insight provides an optimized approval screen for reviewing, editing, and approving multiple time cards at once, as well as the ability to approve cards one by one. For personnel roles that that have a primary use in Business Central of approving time an optimized Role Center is available to simplify review, access, corrections, and approvals.

To approve a time card you must:

• Have the “User ID” field on your Shop Floor Employee Card connected to your Business Central User ID.
• Be a manager of the employee to approve time or have the “Post” flag configured in your Shop Floor Function Permission.

This role center is not a requirement for reviewing. If a role will only be using Business Central to review and approve time cards, then an optional role center called “Shop Floor Insight Approver” is available after installing the extension.

After switching to the Shop Floor Insight Approver role center, the view will have actions and menu items optimized for reviewing and approving time.

To approve time manually, or card by card, navigate to Shop Floor Time Cards.

In the Shop Floor Time card list the ‘Approved’ column can be used to quickly identify which cards have not yet been approved. Open an un-approved time card.

The actions bar will have “Prepare”, “Validate”, “Approve”, “Post”, and “Close”. The sequence is left to right to reflect the typical real-world process.

Validation is available in the card by choosing “Validate” in the action list. Warnings and errors will then be shown to help catch potential issues before posting.

After validating the card, choose “Approve”.

The Approvals worksheet is the best approach for approving time. Navigate to “Time Card Approval”.

You’ll be presented with a screen showing multiple lists.

Validation is available in the card by choosing “Validate” in the action list. Warnings and errors will then be shown to help catch potential issues before posting.

The “Filter Options” section dictates which time cards you’ll see, you’ll typically want to only show managed employees. If you need to see open (in-progress), or already approved cards use the “Show Open Cards” and “Show Approved Cards” settings. An optional login date filter can also be used.

Cards that match the time card filters will show in the list. Cards with potential problems will be highlighted ‘Red’. After correcting errors, choose “Re-Validate” from the action list.

This section will show an editable list of time card lines for the selected time card from the previous section. Potential errors will be highlighted as red on the Line No., and if possible then potential issues will also be color coded red in the columns. Time can be adjusted and corrected on this screen.

The panels on the right-hand side categorize errors for the card itself, and for selected lines. After correcting errors, make sure to choose “Re-Validate” from the action list.

Like approving time on the time card itself, the process is to validate then approve. The approvals screen will automatically validate as soon as the worksheet is opened. After correcting errors, choose “Re-Validate” from the actions list. When ready to approve, simply choose “Approve” from the action list. If “Show Approved” is turned off this will have the effect of automatically selecting the next time card that needs to be approved.