A manager is required for non-project time entries, absence, and vacation. Please contact your application administrator.

I was entering and submitting time entries in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and I came across this error when trying to submit a time entry for vacation (not work, not assigned to a project). I had seen this before. Typically, when you receive this, it’s because the user record doesn’t have a manager on it. When I added a manager to the record in the past, I was then able to submit the time entry successfully. For whatever reason, even after assigning a manager, I was still getting the error message. I’m sure deleting the time entries and recreating them would have fixed it, but I didn’t want to do that.

Turns out that the time entry record has a manager field on it. For these records that were causing trouble, the manager fields weren’t set. Since this field doesn’t exist on the standard forms, I use the XRM Toolbox Bulk Data Updater to find these records and then force in a manager.

I don't do much Project Operations work these days. Most of my time now goes to Power BI and getting AI to do this kind of work.

After doing so, the records were able to submit.