Kimai2: Feature request - disable time recording for past months

[eporsche]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
For accounting reasons it should be possible to "close" a past month so that no further changes are possible. A past month can only be opened again by an administrator.
This gives assurance to an employer that times in the time tracking tool are consistent to what has been invoiced to customers or internally to cost centers

Describe the solution you'd like

• past month time booking can be automatically closed with a configurable amount of days, e.g. 5 days
• past month can be manually closed o reopened by users with the correct rights

[kevinpapst]

Collecting ideas/todos for this request:

• There should be a configuration entry for a "don't allow to edit before date".
  
  
  
  • Use \DateTime so we can use not only a date, but also relative formats (like "first day of this month")
  
  
  • If set, it is used to prevent adding entries before that date in the user timesheet.
  
  
  • If set, it is used to prevent changing entries before that date in the user timesheet.
  
  
• The admin view for timesheet will only display a warning, but still allow to change existing or add new entries in that "past period".

Regarding invoices: that will be handled in a different request, as I plan to assign timesheet entries to invoices after generation. These entries will not be editable afterwards any longer.

[HeinzWuert]

I don't know if a fixed date is the best way, may be one of two!
The second way would be the user finishes his invoice for the month. After he has finished (with warning windows, that changes are not further possible) all bookings can be made by the company administration.
An automatic completion should be possible too.
BUT: For the Kimai administration it must be possible to make changes!

[cbellersen]

We would greatly appreciate this feature as well. I would like contribute a suggestion, based on how this is implemented in our current time tracking software:

• After a user is done entering his time reports, he can pick a date, until he wishes to “release” his reports. He can no longer add or edit reports before this date.
  

• An admin user / team lead can see all the dates, until other users have released their time reports. He can also re-open the reports, if regular users wishes to change something or add a report prior to the release date.
  

Our currenct software also offers a “finalize” feature, which the admin user can use on all released reports, but I don’t think that is essential.

I believe this feature is important, because a service company like ours invoices its customer on a monthly basis. So we have to make sure, that no reports will be added or edited for periods, which have been invoiced. Those hours would be lost.

[cbellersen]

Or even simpler: Mocoapp just lets you input date, before which timesheet entries are locked. For us, as a small company with 10 employees, this would be totally suficcient:

[kevinpapst]

With the next release there will be a lockdown period.
This might or might not be the exact solution you described in this issue, but the chosen way doesn't need any manual steps to be taken by admins.
You can read more about it here: https://www.kimai.org/documentation/timesheet.html#lockdown-period