ZEIT.IO is a platform for digital time recording and invoicing. There has also been a direct integration with SAP Business ByDesign for a few months. This article describes the use of time tracking for the user (employee/contractor). This article does not describe how to link a ZEIT.IO project to SAP ByD.

As an external project employee, you previously received an Excel file from your team lead with pre-filled activity numbers from SAP ByD and you had to record your times in Excel. At the end of the month, you had to print out the Excel file, have your supervisor sign it and send the Excel file to a certain person, who transferred the booked times to SAP ByD using a special Excel add-on.
Both the time recording via Excel and the manual approval process are now completely eliminated!

A project on ZEIT.IO can optionally also have activities to which employees can book their times. It is now possible to link a project on ZEIT.IO with an SAP personnel number. If this is the case, then all activities (tasks) of the employee are transferred from SAP ByD to ZEIT.IO as activities. All of this happens in real time! If the employee is assigned other activities in SAP, the activities in ZEIT.IO are also updated a few seconds later and thus always reflect the current status from the SAP system!

If you, as an external project employee, have an active contract on ZEIT.IO and your project is configured correctly, then all you have to do is book your times. To do this, you can click on the stop icon in the timer at any time:

A modal window will open that looks something like this:

Here you will see, among other things, a dropdown menu for project selection and a dropdown for your hourly rate. If you have several hourly wages, e.g. for remote and for on-site, then you can also select which hourly wage you want to post with here. If you expand the project dropdown menu then you should see the project and activities. In the example here, you only have one project to choose from, with 8 activities. The project is called "EGov_2022_06" and the activities are "Implementation", "Productive Release", etc..

Each activity here corresponds to a task from the SAP ByD system. If your tasks in SAP change, then your activities in ZEIT.IO also update in real time!

Please book your times daily! This also means that the project budgets are updated daily and as a contractor you can also see directly what sales you have generated so far.

The system does not allow overbooking of budgets. If you want to record times later for 4 weeks, it is possible that not all times will be accepted if the budget is fully exhausted beforehand.

At the end of the month, you must request approval for your booked times. To do this, please navigate to the "Times" main menu and click on the "Request approval" button.

On the next page you can select the project and a period for which you want to apply for approval.

All booked times not yet approved for selection will be placed on the list. You can optionally add a comment and finally apply for approval.

By clicking on "Request approval" a new timesheet will be opened with your submitted times. Your team lead will be informed via email that you have submitted a new timesheet. The team lead can comment, approve or reject your timesheet. If the timesheet is approved then your booked times will be transferred to SAP ByD and the approval process is complete!

If you participate in the credit note process then, a credit note will be generated for your approved hours, after the timesheet is approved. You will then receive an email with the PDF credit note and you can also view and download the PDF credit note in your ZEIT.IO account at any time. This means you no longer have to issue an invoice.

There is also a ZEIT.IO Chrome Extension that you can use to record your times independently of the website. For further integration you can also use the ZEIT.IO API.

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