Customer Approval For Time Entries

Customer Approval allows you to get your time entries verified and approved by the clients you’re working for. This would let the clients know the total number of hours you’ve worked for them. The approved time entries alone can later be invoiced to the client.

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Understand Customer Approvals

Let us try to understand Customer Approval with the help of a scenario.

Scenario: Andy and his team of employees work on a project, for which they are paid based on the number of hours they work. He records the work done by each employee and sends the time entries to his customer for approval. The customer gets to know the exact number of hours spent on each task and the total time spent on finishing the project. Once the time entries are approved by the customer, Andy can invoice the client for the same, thus making the whole process smooth and easy for both the Andy and his client.


Enable Customer Approvals

Enable Customer Approval

If you haven’t enabled projects and timesheets in the customer portal, a pop-up will appear asking you to enable it.

Enable Customer Approval

Insight: Customer Approvals are only available for customers for whom you’ve enabled the customer portal.


Create Customer Approvals

Once you have enabled Customer Approval, you can view it by going to Time Tracking and selecting Customer Approvals.

Customer Approvals are available only for projects for which you’ve enabled them.

To enable Customer Approval for a project:

Create Customer Approval

There are two ways through which you can create customer approvals:

1. From the Customer Approvals Module

Create Customer Approval

2. From the Timesheet Module

Create Customer Approval

Once you choose any of the above methods, you’ll need to fill in the following details:

Create Customer Approval

Note: You cannot include the time entries that have already been invoiced in a customer approval.

Customer Approval Actions

The Customer Approvals tab lists all your customer approvals which can then be submitted, approved or rejected.

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Approving Customer Approvals

There are three ways by which a Customer Approval can be approved.

1. From the Customer Portal

Approve Customer Approval

As soon as a time entry is approved, you will get notified within Zoho Books.

2. From the Timesheet Module

Approve Customer Approval

3. From the Customer Approvals Module

Approve Customer Approval

Rejecting Customer Approvals

Customer Approvals can be rejected in three ways as well.

1. From the Customer Portal

Reject Customer Approval

You will be notified if any of your time entries are rejected along with their reason within Zoho Books.

Reject Customer Approval

Note: You can use this comment section to exchange messages and discuss about time entries with your clients.

2. From the Timesheet Module

Sometimes, your clients may directly tell you that they don’t approve of an invoice instead of rejecting it from the customer portal. In such cases, you can manually mark invoices as rejected. To do so:

Reject Customer Approval

3. From the Customer Approvals Module

Reject Customer Approval

Note: Only submitted customer approvals can be marked as rejected.

Other Actions for Customer Approval

Let us take a look at some of the actions that can be performed in Customer Approvals.

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Edit, Print, Download and Delete Customer Approvals

Here are the list of actions that can be performed upon a customer approval:

Other Actions in Customer Approvals

Customer Approval Filters

We have a set of filters based on which you can filter your customer approvals and list them.

Customer Approvals can be listed based on their status and the customer names. The status can be chosen from the Status dropdown and the customer name can be chosen from Select Customer dropdown. The following are the status filters that are available in Zoho Books for Customer Approvals:

Other Actions in Customer Approvals

These filters can also be used by your clients from the Customer Portal.


Disable Customer Approval

Prerequisite: To disable the Customer Approvals feature for your organization, you will have to disable Customer Approvals for every individual project for which you have enabled customer approvals. To do so:

Next, to disable Customer Approvals for your organization:

Other Actions in Customer Approvals
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