Reports, Time & Billing, Project should get you what you need. The reports under Reports, Project will not show you anything that has not yet been posted as payroll or customer invoices.

thanks -
Tried that, both by project and by employee. In each case I only get the project info, not the activities (Item). I need the activities within each project to send to the client for budgeting/status purposes. When I do an activity report I don't get the project info, and unfortunately the activities are the same for each project (site). I haven't found a way to get both columns in one report.
The only thing I can figure out is to print every timeslip and do a manual tally. That seems like a waste of time and paper.

reports, time & billing, project, allocation by project
reports, time & billing, billing, time by activity

these 2 reports will give you what you need, where the timeslip # is common
you could export both to excel, and create a macro to lookup the project into the activity worksheet, per the timeslip #

Sorry, I thought there was an extra Categories button on these reports that allowed you to select item codes like the other reports. I did not realise they did not put that on these Project reports. Roger's option is probably the best.

Thanks Roger & Richard. That still doesn't solve the problem. What I want is a report that shows the activities (items) for a specific project over a specific time period for budget tracking (which rarely coincides to either payroll dates or billing activity).
If employee X has two meetings with the same client on the same day at two different project sites, the timeslip number will not identify the meetings as being two separate projects, because meetings always have the same activity code. I would need a different timeslip for each project as well as each employee.
Is there a way to create a custom report or export the actual timeslip (containing all three pieces of data) directly? say using VBA? Otherwise its probably simpler to just keep using the same Excel timesheet I've used for the last 20 years, not Sage timeslips.

you could use excel/access to retrieve/read the actual data using odbc
the timeslip tables are ttsrec,ttsline,ttsliprj - with id's to link the records together
I haven't yet found the project table

Roger, try tProject as the master project table.

hmy, Roger is correct. You can use Excel to pull data from the file through MSQuery or VBA. Only the Sage 50 reports themselves export, so Roger's suggestion about exporting two Timeslips reports and merging them together in Excel is your best option if you want to push from Sage 50 to Excel.

You are suggesting, then, that I use a different timeslip for every project, each day, each employee?

Or alternatively, create a new project number for each project activity? i.e. C901.1 for travel, C901.2 for design fees, C901.3 etc.

Sorry, but my messages never touched on data entry, they only discussed reporting on them.

hmy said:

You are suggesting, then, that I use a different timeslip for every project, each day, each employee?

I didn't wouldn't suggest that, instead I would suggest using SQL queries through ODBC.  It should be possible to join the data fields together into any combination that you need. 

For a generic example of how to extract data:

Under Reports | Microsoft Office Reports, open the worksheet called 'Employee Hours Worksheet' that uses VBA to do a SQL query through ODBC, directly from the Sage 50 data, and 'refresh' it with your data.

You could start with that report, and add code to it that would extract the data you need.

The VBA code that does the SQL data extraction currently just gets company and employee names:

sqComInfo = "SELECT tCompany.sCompName, tFileVer.nDataType FROM tCompany tCompany," & _
        " tFileVer tFileVer WHERE tCompany.lID = tFileVer.lID"
    sqReport = "SELECT sName FROM tEmp"

and assembles a timesheet for manual data entry.  You could add to that code and build any sort of report that you need.

I hope that helps,

Randy

Hi RandyW - sorry, that was intended as a question. I'll rephrase.. Does anyone have experience with manipulating the timeslip module in order to track activity, and hours per activity on a per project basis, within Sage 50 2014? I wonder if "different timeslip for every project, each day, each employee" would create unanticipated complications. I need this to refine both my budget updates and quoting process, which are external to Sage.

I'm trying out modification of the Microsoft report example as you suggested - it looks promising. I've modified the user rights for myself to read/write for externals but I keep getting an error stating I don't have sufficient rights....from other products, etc. when I try to refresh the report. I am the sysadmin and I'm using the same password that enables me to run all other activities successfully (in MU mode). Do I need to always be in single user mode for MS reports?

thanks

hmy said:

different timeslip for every project, each day, each employee" would create unanticipated complications

I can't see how you could do it without splitting out by date and employee, Project shouldn't be necessary but probably not a problem, there's no record limit that I know of.  

At first glance it might look like more work to separate each timesheet by date on the data entry side, but there's no other way to record the actual date if there's more than one day (except some horrible kludge like putting the date in front of every description line on a time sheet like '20151014 1241')

hmy said:

I keep getting an error stating I don't have sufficient rights

I get the same error after attempting to export all 18,000 journals in the file that I have open, but not when I just export one month.   The VBA isn't coded well enough to distinguish between a variety of 'Didn't work' scenarios, so it just reports a an error message that says you might not have rights.

I've found it difficult to get it to work using 'read-only' third party access, so when I'm troubleshooting / trying scenarios, I use the actual 'sysadmin' ID, so that I know it isn't a rights issue, and when I switch to using the intended user's login ID and it stops working, it's almost certainly a rights issue.

One possibility if it doesn't work, is that no Sage 50 password is more than 7 characters.   If you typing 'MySecretPassword' in the program, it will read 'MySecre' and ignore the rest!  If you try to use 'MySecretPassword' to open from Excel, the password module will hash the entire thing, and it won't match the hash of 'MySecre'.

hmy said:

Do I need to always be in single user mode for MS reports?

No, in fact you must NOT be in Single User Mode, Be in multi-user mode, or have the 'company file' closed.  (accessing the data from Excel that is in a closed 'company file' will work, it just may take a few seconds to load.)

Richard - for my goal to be successful, IMO data in and data out appear to inextricably linked. I would prefer to keep the process within Sage. Excel, MSQuery and VBA would seem to be a bit more cumbersome.

To test the T&B merging method suggested 9Oct by Roger, which you endorsed, I created 2 reports using a single timeslip with 8 -1 hr blocks using 2 unique activities and 4 unique projects, all for 1 client and 1 employee (which isn't unrealistic for my business). The result did not provide a means to run an query since the timeslip # does not provide a unique identifier. Roger's suggestion seems to point to a different timeslip for each project. Am I missing something?

"At first glance it might look like more work to separate each timesheet by date on the data entry side, but there's no other way to record the actual date if there's more than one day"

Agreed - I was thinking 1 project per slip, per day (resulting in 2 or 3 slips each day, each employee), but in retrospect, I don't think that will help either. Right now I use one (multi project) slip per employee, per day.

Also - shortening the password by one char solved the rights issue.

I'll continue to work toward your suggested method, but for now I need to switch hats and focus on billable client work and deadlines in order to pay the bills.

Thank you! - you have been very helpful..