The status of a time entry correlates to the entry's stage in the approval process. Time entries have four possible states which are Not Submitted, Pending Approval, Rejected, and Approved.
Each status setting is associated with a color so you can glance at a time entry and immediately know its state. Entries in the Not Submitted state will be gray, Pending Approval will be yellow, Rejected will be red, and Approved will be green.
When a project is configured, it can be set up for either manual or automatic approvals. For projects that use automatic approvals, the time entries will turn green (Approved) immediately upon creation.
Below is a brief explanation of the four time entry states.
Not Submitted
All time entries that require manual approval start in the Not Submitted state. This simply means that the item has been created but has yet to be submitted for approval. When a time entry is in the Not Submitted state, the time will be shown within a gray status oval.
Pending Approval
The pending approval state means that the time entry has been submitted for approval but the approver has not taken action yet. When a time entry is in the Pending Approval state, it will be shown within a yellow status oval.
For workspaces where Multi-Step Approval Workflow is enabled, hovering over the yellow oval will display the current progress of the time entry in the workflow. An example of this is found below:
Rejected
When the approver rejects a time entry, that person can provide an explanation as to why the entry is being rejected. The original submitter can then make any needed adjustments to the entry and resubmit it for approval. When a time entry is in the Rejected state, it will be shown within a red status oval.
When workspaces leverage the Timesheets feature, rejected time entries are sent back to the member for editing, as described above. Unsubmitting the timesheet is not required for the member to edit and resubmit rejected time entries.
Approved
The goal is to get all time entries into an approved state before invoices are created for a given period. When a project is configured for automatic time approval, time entries for that project will be approved immediately. When a time entry is in the Approved state, it will be shown within a green status oval.
Once a time entry has been approved, it will show up as locked for the submitter unless the submitter's security role has either the Administer all member time and expenses general permission or the Administer project time and expenses project permission. Once the time is associated with a published invoice, the time will be locked for all workspace members, including Workspace Admins.