Introduction

BadgeOut is where your team tracks time and where you manage the contracts that time bills against. The hours people log flow into approvals, balances, and reports; the contracts you set up give those hours somewhere to land. If you're setting BadgeOut up or running it for a team, start here: this page explains what BadgeOut does and how the parts connect, so the task guides that follow make sense.

What BadgeOut is

BadgeOut does two things that depend on each other. It tracks time: your team logs hours, attributes each to the work it belongs to, and submits them at the end of each pay period. And it manages contracts: the agreements that work bills against, each with its own budget. You set up the contracts and the organization hours flow through, review what comes in, and pull the reports. You log your own time just like everyone else.

The building blocks

A few core ideas show up everywhere in BadgeOut. Once these click, the rest of the help center reads quickly.

• Organization: the company or team you administer. Everything in BadgeOut belongs to one organization, and hours never cross from one to another.
• Contract: an agreement your team's work bills against. Each contract runs over one or more periods and carries the budget and the charge codes that hours are logged to.
• Timesheet: where each person enters hours, day by day, for the current pay period.
• Charge code: the bucket each hour is recorded against, so time maps to the right contract and category of work. You create these and assign who can use them.
• Time off: paid time off your team requests and tracks; each request draws from a balance that accrues under a policy you set.
• Approvals: the review step. When a member submits a timesheet, a reviewer checks it and either approves it or sends it back.
• Reports: the rolled-up view of time spent across people, projects, and periods.

How it fits together

Contracts, charge codes, and your organization are set up first. After that, a typical pay period runs like this:

1. Through the period, each person opens their timesheet and enters hours against the relevant charge codes.
2. When the period closes, they submit. The timesheet locks and moves into the approval queue.
3. A reviewer approves it, or sends it back with a note so the owner can fix and resubmit.
4. Approved hours flow into reports and roll up against the contract they were logged to. Any time off taken draws from the person's balance along the way.

That loop repeats every period. Most of the setup is one-time; day to day, your attention is on approvals and the occasional exception.

Roles, and who sees what

Not everyone sees the same things, and as an administrator you decide who gets what:

• Members log and submit their own time.
• Reviewers / managers also approve the timesheets of the people they oversee.
• Administrators configure the organization: members, charge codes, policies, and pay-period rules.

If a guide describes a screen your reviewers don't have, the action is administrator-only. See Roles and permissions for the full breakdown.

Up next