Creating TimeSheet Periods

[ggeorgop]

I am trying to create timesheet periods in our PServer 2007 instance. I
understand that one needs to create financial periods prior to that which I
have done without a hitch.

From there I moved to creating TimeSheet Periods. When you enter that
screen it appears that it wants to create 52 periods to cover what one would
figure to be a fiscal year. When attempting to do so I receive the following
error:

Project Server timesheet periods cannot have duplicate names, or gaps or
overlaps between adjoining period start and end dates. Period "New Period
:7/8/2007-7/8/2007" does not conform to this standard. Correct the periods,
and then save your data again.
Project Server timesheet periods cannot have duplicate names, or gaps or
overlaps between adjoining period start and end dates. Period "1" does not
conform to this standard. Correct the periods, and then save your data again.

The second one is repeated 52 times with the "1" incrementing through to "51".

Am I missing somthing? or Are the Timesheet Periods supposed to be create
one year at a time? I am able to do that without a problem.

One would figure that you could do better reporting if they were more
granular. As well, the default option of 52 weeks is quite misleading if
they are not to be established in that manner.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
George

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

ggeorgop --

The default settings on the Timesheet Periods page expect you to create 52
weekly time periods in a bulk creation, but you don't have to do that. In
fact, our best practice is to create only a few Timesheet periods in bulk
initially, and then to confirmt that the periods created are what you want.
If the resulting time periods are not what you wanted (or expected), then
you have to delete them, and here's the kicker: you cannot delete them in
bulk! When I create Timesheet periods, I usually start by creating four,
examining the results, and if I like what I see, I create 48 more in bulk.
If I don't like the results, I delete the four and try again.

When you create Timesheet periods in bulk, make sure the starting date of
the first time period starts on a Sunday or Monday, according to whether
your company's work week goes from Sunday through Saturday, or Monday
through Sunday. It sounds like you didn't do that, resulting in screwed up
Timesheet periods. I'm afraid because of your intial mistake that you are
going to have to delete those 51 Timesheet periods and start over. Hope
this helps.

 

[James Fraser]

The second one is repeated 52 times with the "1" incrementing through to "51".

Am I missing somthing? or Are the Timesheet Periods supposed to be create
one year at a time? I am able to do that without a problem.

One would figure that you could do better reporting if they were more
granular. As well, the default option of 52 weeks is quite misleading if
they are not to be established in that manner.

Any help would be appreciated.

I don't think you are missing anything. What you are attempting should
work. I've seen the happen once, and it appeared to be related to the
Daylight Saving Time change.

Check to see if your server is up to date on patches, some of which
might change the DST handling and dates. Also check other time related
settings on your server to see if it's something there.

When I ran into this, we dug in pretty deep to discover that the
server was trying to create time periods through 1 AM of the following
week, and then the following weeks time period couldn't be created, if
I recall correctly. Some how we worked around this by hand.


James Fraser

 

[ggeorgop]

Thank you for the advice that both of you guys offered.

I checked patches and seemed to be out on these two criticals: KB933729 and
KB941202 Neither of them seemed to indicate that they related to DST
changes, but I applied them anyway.

I think it was a time zone discrepency that was the root cause in the end.

Here is the detail:

The environment is made up of 2 servers (3 if you include SQL). One acting
as the WFE and the WSS server. The other machine is the PS Appliance.

Turns out that one of them (WFE) was in Central time and the other (PS
Appliance)was in EST where it belonged.

I corrected this condition but still had flaky results with end dates
overlapping with start dates as well as dates slipping by a day wide at both
ends when saving the periods.

I decided to restart both machines and it worked like a charm from there.

Thanks again!!

George Georgopoulos