The Timesheet tab has two modes:  the timesheet itself and  expenses lodgement.

You record the time you spend on Tasks on the timesheet. You can also edit existing timesheet entries prior to them being submitted for confirmation (see below).

Lodge expenses against the categories defined in the Settings tab, including notation of any tax component.

Choose how much of your Timesheet is visible in the Central Screen by choosing from  a single day,
 five-day week,  seven-day week or  calendar month.

Time cannot be entered on the calendar month view, but it does provide a total of each day’s work.

Navigate the timeframe shown in the Central Screen with the  Previous,  Current and  Next buttons.

The Previous and Next buttons skip through days, weeks or months as dictated by the amount of time shown (see above); the Current button displays the current day within the active timeframe.

To go directly to a specific date, use the Date Selector in the panel on the right side of the screen. You can click on a single date, or drag across a range of dates.

Two special functions in the Timesheet allow you to  submit the visible time entries and  duplicate the current visible timeframe to another date or date range.

Submitted time entries may be confirmed by a supervisor (if this requirement is specified by your administrator) through the Work & Expenses Approval mode of the Projects tab (see below), which then become available for invoicing on the Billing tab. Time entries do not need to be formally submitted to be used as data in any of the Dashboard tab’s graphical or tabular reports.

Replicating time entries to another period is a simple way to record the same activity over multiple timeframes. Any existing timesheet entries in the target period will be overwritten if they conflict with the source time entries. Both sets of time entries remain independently editable.

The Projects tab has two modes:  project management and  time and expense approval.

You manage your clients, projects, portfolios and tasks in project management mode. Each item you define populates the Central Screen with a number of tabs where you can manage budgets, timeframes, charging structure, inter-relationships, and much more.

By default, the requirement for time and expense approval is turned off, and all transactions on the Timesheet tab are immediately available for final confirmation and invoicing on the Billing tab. Those customers who choose to implement approval use this mode to confirm that time entries and out-of-pocket expenses recorded by users in their workgroup have been lodged against the correct project and are flagged for on-charging to clients correctly.

The Resources tab has three modes:  project scheduling,  resource scheduling and  resource management.

A project’s workflow can be managed – and tasks assigned to specific resources – in project scheduling mode. Select a project or task in the navigation tree to specify dependency (those tasks which must be completed before the selected task can be started) by activating the Predecessors view at the top of the tree. Selecting a project or task also enables  resource scheduling, the functionality of which is described in the next section.

Administrators can view resources’ schedules as a Gantt chart. More information on functionality available in this mode is described below.

Both project schedule and resource schedule modes offer a  zoom slider for their Gantt charts. With this control you can zoom out to see a client’s or long-term project’s entire scheduling, or zoom in to show scheduling for shorter tasks which might not otherwise be large enough to see on-screen or select.

Greater control over scheduling is offered with the  snap-to-grid tools. With snap-to-grid enabled, work allocation Gantt bars will automatically start and end at the increments dictated by the current level of zoom, e.g. from the start of a week to the end of a week. Disabling snap-to-grid allows you to drag the start or end of a work allocation Gantt bar within the displayed zoom increment.

Resources’ roles and skills, cost and charge rates, workgroup assignments, and other resource-specific settings are managed in resource management mode. The various parameters and options available for this area can be organized in the Settings tab.

Tasks are assigned to specific resources in resource scheduling mode. The list of resources can be filtered by  skill association, and/or sorted by  cost or  availability.

Filtering the resource list to show only those with the appropriate associated skills ensures that work is assigned only to those resources best suited to perform it. The skills that each resource has, and which each task requires, are defined in the Settings tab and managed in ProjectPartner’s resource management and project management modes respectively.

Sorting resources by cost helps preserve your profitability by listing those resources which cost you the least first. This can be complemented by skill filtering – it’s no good assigning work to an inexpensive resource who’s incapable of doing it!

Availability sorting shows which resources have the fewest other commitments during the timeframe specified for the task to be performed. Again, this sorting can be complemented by skill filtering.

A selected assignment in the Gantt chart can be  deleted or  locked or unlocked to prevent or allow changes.

The resource schedule is a Gantt chart showing all resources’ allocations, so you can quickly see where workloads might be able to be balanced better.

A selected assignment in the Gantt chart can be  deleted or  locked or unlocked to prevent or allow changes.

Resource schedule mode offers “sandbox” scheduling, so you can experiment with changes to work assignments without affecting the actual (“master”) schedule currently in effect:

With the master schedule selected in the navigation tree, you can  overwrite the sandbox schedule with the entire current contents of the master schedule.

Switch to the sandbox schedule view to test your revised scheduling. In this view, you can  purge all sandbox entries and start with an empty schedule; confirmed changes to your schedule can be
 uploaded to the master (live) schedule.

The comparison view allows you to see and edit both the master and sandbox schedules, but neither can be copied to the other in this view.

The Analytics tab has three modes:  Dashboards,  Reports and  Alerts.

Dashboards mode gives you access to an incredibly diverse range of dynamic graphs. Ranging from enterprise profitability and budget adherance to unaccounted time and demand forecasting, these advanced reports let you instantly see where efficiency and performance improvements can be made to help keep your business strong and growing.

Similar detailed information is available in Reports mode as grouped data tables, ready to email or copy to your clipboard for use in another application.

Notification of user-defined events can be managed in Alerts mode. Set up automatic email notifications to yourself and colleagues for when the work recorded for a project is at risk of exceeding its budget, or for when the estimated effort required to complete a task is greater than the allocated resources’ available time.

The Billing tab has four modes:  invoice approval,  invoice processing,  reprint invoices and  accounting export.

Users’ time and expense entries are available for final editing and confirmation in invoice approval mode. Only confirmed transactions can be included when generating invoices.

Also in invoice approval mode, you can add  disbursements (external costs incurred in completing the project) or  sales (physical goods manufactured or purchased for, and on-sold to your client as part of, the project).

Invoice processing mode is where all confirmed transaction data is generated as an invoice in PDF format. All data – time entries, expenses/disbursements and sale items – which have been processed for invoicing become locked and cannot be edited in any way.

You can review and filter historical invoice data and re-export the data or reprint invoice PDFs.

All finalized billing data can be exported for use in an external FMIS or ERP software, for external accounting or analysis. The list of supported file formats will continue to grow to meet customers’ needs.