The scenario here is that you want to enter time for a non-user of Project Server possibly to capture Travel & Expense or cost for a consultant that does not have access to the system.
The goal is to create a timesheet so the data (costs) flow to the Timesheet tables – as these are used to connect to your Financial systems and also flow to your project plan so you can capture those costs at a project level which roles into a Portfolio of projects.
The Approach: Set up a resource (non-user) and create a surrogate timesheet for that non-user of Project Server. The catch here is that you will need to set the Assignment Owner of the project task for the non-user consultant to who ever will be creating the Surrogate Timesheet. This is the only way that you can get the time to post to both Timesheet and Task tables (meaning the time reflected on the timesheet gets back into the plan).
Note: The surrogate timesheet feature works fine for resources/users in PWA. The above is for non-PWA users.
Hope this saves you hours of research time.
Are you doing something similar? Please comment and let us and other know how it is working effectively for your organization.
-Jacques