Continuing with our blog series about CATS, we’ll next cover CATS Profiles. At the most basic level, CATS Profiles determine the data entry fields available for entry or display:
- How the timesheet will appear
- Allow individual employee or multiple employee entry
- Fields available for entry and to be displayed
- The number of days available to be entered
Profiles have 8 sections that may be configured to produce the desired data entry process.
- General settings
- Time settings
- Person selection
- Cost accounting variant
- Default values
- Worklist
- Data entry checks
- Workflow
Several options exist in the General settings section that may be of interest. You should only select the options that are relevant to the user.
- We can display such things as a total line by employee or the target hours for a given day.
- Target hours are drawn from Infotype 0007 Time Management work schedule rule.
- If an employee doesn’t work the target hours, then maybe an absences needs to be entered for the remaining hours.
- You can allow hours to be entered or start and end times.
- Future dated entries may be transferred with current or prior dated entries or held until the future dated entry is in the current period.
- Settings for the approval process are made.
- If approval required is selected, you may want to also select the no change after approval. Then an employee can’t make changes. You can use a different profile for a manager or time administrator to allow changes after approval.
- If no change after approval is not selected, data that goes through the approval process may be changed at a later time and then transferred to HR.
- Selecting the Immediate transfer to HR will transfer the data to HR when the data is Saved
In Time settings, we can configure that we want weekly time entry with one period or multiple periods.
- If you allow future data entry, you may want the current and a future period to appear.
- This way a week of vacation may be entered ahead of time
- You can also define what day is the beginning of the work week.
- Some of you employees may be Sunday and some Monday.
- You would create to profiles identically, but with a different start day
Finally, in the third section, you may set the employee groupings to automatically default the employees that should have time entered. This is very useful if you have time administrators who enter the time for the same group of employees period after period
After creating the profile, the fields displayed in the Time Sheet when maintaining or displaying are defined. Selecting the fields and setting attributes makes user entry easier and reduces error.
- Attributes set for a field influence the target module.
- Should a field appear or not.
- Should a field be required.
- Depending on the module receiving CATS data, fields may or may not be required. If you send data to Project Systems you need to have the network field.
- Displaying fields is done by configuring modifiable fields and influencing fields.
- Modifiable fields are set as the base for all data entry profiles.
- Influencing fields are profile-specific field attributes. Keep number of fields displayed on the screen to the absolute minimum.
Overall, keep in mind the more fields on a screen, the more chance for user input error.
Keep the fields to the minimal number possible.
Below we have the fields that may be configured to appear, not appear, and be required.
You’ll always start off with the Modifiable tab because the configuration set here goes across all profiles. If you set a modifiable field attribute to Hide, no profile will be able to see that field, regardless of what you set under influencing.
Under the influencing tab, you set the fields that you want to see in your specific profile
The screen print shows the influencing field attributes.
The next subject we’ll cover is CATS User Parameters. Very useful to make the process more efficient.