Add An Assignment - Overview and Main Details Tab

An assignment in Etz is what might otherwise be referred to as a placement or booking, describing the billable work that a specific candidate performs for a specific client in a particular time-frame. It contains all of the important information of the assignment, including pay and charge details.

Assignments are at the heart of the Etz timesheets process - they are responsible for the automatic generation of timesheets for each client for each job.

When creating a new assignment, it is critical that care is taken to ensure that each field is completed correctly, as the information entered here is what produces the sales invoices to your clients and payments to your suppliers/PAYE candidates.

This article is the first of four that will guide you through the process of adding a new assignment.

To start adding a new assignment, go to ‘Reference Data’ and then ‘Assignment Entry’. This will bring up a list of existing assignments entered into the system, with the option to search for a particular entry by status or keyword.

To add a new assignment, click on the ‘Add new assignment’ button at the bottom of the page.

This will take you to an empty form, where you will be able to start entering details for the new assignment. There are a number of tabs on the right hand side, relating to different areas of information for the assignment. There are four of these that are particularly important - ‘Main Details’, ‘Authorisation’, ‘Categories’ and ‘Costing’.

The remainder of this article will focus on completion of the ‘Main Details’ tab. Please see the three follow-up articles for details on completing the three remaining tabs.

The most important fields within this tab are:

Agency Ref No: normally used when importing suppliers from a front office system that has its own unique reference code, which differs to the one held on your accounts package. If you would like this option to be available to you please contact our support desk.

Job Title: represents the type of work that the candidate will be doing for the client and, if used, will be shown on documents produced by the system, such as timesheets and invoices.

Client: lists all of the clients entered into the system (via the ‘Client Entry’ section). Please select the client that this assignment is for.

Purchase Order: if a purchase order has been raised to cover the new assignment, the purchase order should be selected from the drop-down menu in this field.

Update all un-invoiced timesheets to use this PO: will modify all existing timesheets to use the purchase order defined in the above field. Please note: use this feature with caution. If this option is selected after you have added a new PO to the assignment, but there are older timesheets that have not yet been invoiced, then these older timesheets will be updated with the new PO number. Therefore, only use this option if you want all timesheets that have not yet been invoiced to have this new PO number.

Candidate: displays a list of existing candidates on the system (entered via the ‘Candidate Entry’ screen), so that the candidate associated with the assignment can be selected.

Special Terms: optional field for the entry of specific details or notes relating to the assignment. Can be used for agency reference, or, depending on the template, included on sales invoices.

Display to candidate: if ticked, the candidates will be able to view the pay details of the assignment on timesheets when they log into the system.

Payment to: defines where payment for the assignment will be directed. This will default to whatever has been set as the 'Preferred Supplier' in the candidate configuration settings, but can be modified here if different for this assignment.

Start Date and End Date: these fields are used to determine the length of the contract and, consequently, what period to produce timesheets for.

Terminate Assignment: can be used to prematurely end an assignment. Prevents the system from generating any new timesheets and will close and cancel any remaining open timesheets. The end date should be manually amended to reflect the true assignment end date.

Assignment Length: can be used to record the number of hours or days expected to run on the assignment. This field is not mandatory and is purely for reference purposes.

Location / Project: used as a reference throughout the timesheet process of where the assignment work was undertaken. Particularly useful if the candidate is working simultaneously on multiple assignments or in various locations.

Within Timesheet Details: 

Start Date: the date that the system should start generating timesheets from. This will likely only differ from the assignment start date when you first start using the Etz system, to allow you to specify the starting date for using the new timesheet system for existing assignments.

Start Day: the day of the week that timesheets should start on, if using weekly or monthly time periods. The default start day is Monday. The first timesheet in a new assignment will begin on the start date (which may be different to the start day specified here), and all consequent timesheets will begin on the start day.

Time Template: determines the time span of each timesheet (e.g. weekly, fortnightly, monthly) produced by the system, as configured in the ‘Timesheet Timespan‘ section. For more information on how to set up new time-spans, please refer to the article Timesheet Timespan. 

Detailed: determines the amount of information that needs to be entered by the candidate when submitting their timesheet. If this option is ticked, the candidate will be required to enter their start time, end time and break duration for each day on the timesheet. If this option is not ticked, the candidate will only be required to enter the total amount of units worked for each day (e.g. 8 hours, or 1 working day). The detailed option is useful for candidates who work on an hourly rate.

Expenses: defines how expenses are handled for this assignment. For further information about the options available, please refer to the article Expense Processing On Etz - Which Option Is Appropriate For Us?

This completes the information required for the ‘Main Details’ tab. At this point, you can either click on the 'Update' button to save the information, or move on to complete the ‘Authorisation’ tab, as described in the next article: How to add an Assignment - Authorisation tab.