Admin - Reminders

The Reminders feature provides Administrators with the ability to manually send or schedule reminders as emails that are automatically sent to people who have yet to enter time, submit timesheets, or approve time, expenses, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, or vendor invoices.  Other options exist as well.  In addition to selecting person organizations, approval groups and specific criteria, the administrator can set a reminder to run daily, weekly, monthly or at some other interval.  These scheduled reminders accelerate timesheet and expense report processing.  

Here are examples of scheduled reminders you may consider configuring:

 

You can schedule as many reminders as you would like.  Using the selection criteria, you can narrow down the audience that you may send the reminder to.  Using the Admin >> Setup >> Email Reminders, you can customize the subject and message body included in the emails.  

 

For purchasing, there are new reminder types for Purchase Order (PO), Purchase Requisition (PR), and Vendor Invoice (VI):

 

 

Topics covered on this help page include:

 

You may also be interested in:

 

Note: Email Reminders are initiated by an Administrator.  The Unanet system can also send out system initiated Notifications (e.g. a timesheet has been submitted for your approval).  The content of the emails being sent out can be tailored via the Admin >> Setup >> Email Reminders and Admin >> Setup >> Email Notifications screens.

For a complete list of system provided Reminders and Notifications, check out: Admin >> Setup >> Email Reminders and Admin >> Setup >> Email Notifications.

 Note: Users can suppress the sending of Notifications via their Preferences screen, however, they can not choose to suppress the sending of an Email Reminder.


Example Reminders screen:

Depending on the Reminder Type, the lower portion of the screen may redraw with additional selection options appropriate for that type of reminder.  Once you have selected a reminder type and have supplied the desired selection criteria, you can either click on the Preview button to display a list of users that you could subsequently send an email to, or you could click on the Schedule tab to specify a recurring time to have the reminder run automatically.

Most of the Reminder types include the option to specify an Organization and potentially an Approval Group.  Two of the Reminder Types have additional options and are displayed below:

 

Timesheet Submit Reminder

This reminder is typically scheduled to run on or near the last day of a time period.  Some customers may choose to schedule it to run once and others may choose to have it run multiple times (ie once on the morning of the final day of a time period and perhaps once again before users head home for the day).  You can schedule a reminder to run many times per your custom needs.  

This particular reminder will only be sent to the users matching the selection criteria that have yet to submit their timesheets for the given period.

 

Timesheet Minimum Hour Reminder

This reminder is typically scheduled to run every day (perhaps in the early morning hours) to report whether the user entered X number of hours the previous day.  To facilitate this, you would use the relative named date value of Yesterday in the Date field.  If you wanted to have this reminder scheduled to run against a specific date, you can supply a specific Custom value in the Date control.  

With this reminder you also have the option of specifying whether to compare the user's entered time against a hard-coded number of hours or the number of hours as defined in that user's Business Week definition.  Note that this option will also take into account the days a user is scheduled to work based on their Business Week, but it does not consider any Holiday schedule that a user may be associated with.

Field Descriptions (click on a link below for additional information):

 

  • Reminder Type

  • Person Organization

  • Additional Fields may display depending on the Reminder Type

    • Time Period Type and Weekly Overlap - Note that when specifying a time period of type "Weekly Overlap" and running a reminder on the overlap day, the "Current Period" option would match the time period beginning on that date, and likewise, using the "Previous Period" under the otherwise same conditions would match the time period ending on that date -- such that the reminder would not apply to both time periods that overlap that same date.

  • Email Summary -- Note that on the Timesheet Submit and Timesheet Minimum Hour reminders, there is an additional section called Email Summary.  When running these types of email reminders, the administrator has the option of including a summary report that will be sent to:

    • Send Summary to Manager - use this option to send a summary report to a Manager which will detail a listing of all users that were included in that instance of a reminder.  Only those Managers having a user being reminded will be included in the list of Managers receiving an Email Summary.  Further, if a user's approval group contains more than one approving manager, the summary email will only be sent to the first manager in that group.

    • Additional comma-separated e-mail addresses - similar to the Send Summary to Manager feature above, this option allows for an Email Summary to be sent to one or many email destinations.

      Note that you can send the Email Summary to either the Manager and/or Additional e-mail addresses, that is, entering only additional e-mail addresses without checking the Manager box will result in the Summary being sent to those additional emails and not the Manager.

Using several of these options, the administrator can send out a reminder to many end users, include a summary report to each included user's manager and/or one or more specific email addresses.  Email templates for the summary emails can be tailored via the Admin >> Setup >> Email Notifications screen (Timesheet Minimum Hour Summary and Timesheet Submission Due  templates).

 

Button Descriptions (click on a link below for additional information):

 

  • Preview (to preview who this reminder may go to if executed immediately)

  • Save (to save a scheduled reminder)


Preview and Send Reminders

Once you have entered the selection criteria for your particular reminder and clicked on the Preview button, you will be presented with a screen that resembles the following:

Clicking on the Send button, will send an email to any of the users on this list that have the Send check box checked.


Scheduling Reminders

Once you have specified the desired selection criteria for a reminder, you can click on the Schedule tab to schedule the reminder to run on a recurring basis.  By default, the reminder is not scheduled and thus this tab will have no scheduling detail fields available and None selected.  You have several options for scheduling, including Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Advanced.

Note that you the schedule utility can be disabled upon system startup via the unanet.scheduler.disabled property.  This may be useful, for example, if you are running a testing environment that is a clone of your production and you do not wish to send out reminders, etc.

The examples below show the various options available with each scheduling interval.  Examples of the various scheduling screens follow:

Daily

Weekly

* If you are running a bi-weekly time period and would like to set up a reminder to run on submit day for example, you could use the Weekly tab, and select the Every 2 Weeks option (on the Every field).  The trigger will actually fire every week, but the first step is to determine if this is the 2nd week before it proceeds with the reminder.  When this feature is used, it will fire and send out reminders every other week beginning with the first week (ie 1st, 3rd, 5th weeks a reminder will be sent out -- weeks 2, 4, 6, etc, the trigger will fire -- but no reminders will be sent).

Monthly

Advanced

 

If you are familiar with UNIX-style crontab files, then you will be right at home with the Advanced Schedule Type—although there are some critical differences.

 

 

Allowed

Field

Values

Special Characters

Minute

0 - 59

, - * /

Hour

0 - 23

, - * /

Day of Month

1 - 31

, - * / L W ?  (no ranges or lists with L or W)

Month

1 - 12

, - * /

Day of Week

1 - 7

, - * / L #?

 

 

Here are some examples (unspecified field values are blank):

Field Values

Meaning

Minute: 0
Hour: 12

Fire at 12 PM (noon) every day

Minute: *
Hour: 14

Fire every minute starting at 2 PM and ending at 2:59 PM, every day

Minute: */5
Hour: 14

Fire every 5 minutes starting at 2 PM and ending at 2:55 PM, every day

Minute: 10,44
Hour: 14
Month: 3
Day Of Week: 4

Fire at 2:10 PM and 2:44 PM, every Wednesday in March

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Day Of Week: 2-6

Fire at 10:15 AM, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Day Of Month: 15

Fire at 10:15 AM, on the 15th of every month

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Day Of Month: L

Fire at 10:15 AM, on the last day of every month

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Day Of Week: 6L

Fire at 10:15 AM, on the last Friday of every month

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Month: 3,6,9,12
Day Of Week: 6L

Fire at 10:15 AM, on the last Friday of March, June, September, and December

Minute: 15
Hour: 10
Day Of Week: 6#3

Fire at 10:15 AM, on the third Friday of every month

 

To accommodate a Semi-Monthly:

 

 

 

 

* If you are running a bi-weekly time period and would like to set up a reminder to run on submit day for example, you could use the Weekly tab, and select the Every 2 Weeks option (on the Every field).  The trigger will actually fire every week, but the first step is to determine if this is the 2nd week before it proceeds with the reminder.  When this feature is used, it will fire and send out reminders every other week beginning with the first week (ie 1st, 3rd, 5th weeks a reminder will be sent out -- weeks 2, 4, 6, etc, the trigger will fire -- but no reminders will be sent).


Scheduled Reminders

You can view a list of reminders that you have scheduled on the Admin >> Schedule screen.  From that screen you can run, edit or delete a scheduled reminder.

Multi-Front End Server Note:  If you are running multiple front end web servers and using the scheduling feature, you will need to make sure that the times are synchronized between the two servers to within about one second or events may be triggered multiple times, or not at all, or the database scheduling tables may be corrupted.


Temporarily Turning off Reminders

Note that disabling an Email reminder email template will not prevent future scheduled reminders from being sent.  In order to prevent the sending of a scheduled reminder, you will need to remove or modify the schedule entry, it is not sufficient to simply inactivate a reminder email template.

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