Clients
Clients was previously a subtab of the Manager tab on the old PM3time layout, and now has its own dedicated tab. It is likely that an Administrator will also use this page.
A Client is a company or group or department which own projects. All projects need to be linked to some Client. This is usually the organisation that you bill for the work done.
When you register your company initially, a client with the same name as your company is created automatically. This allows you to create projects and tasks for internal work and to record time as Annual Leave or Sick Leave. Any other clients will need to be created explicitly.
In the Clients list, an Admin can see all Clients for their PM3time subscription. They also can add, delete, or edit existing clients.
To delete, (e.g. Clients who have no projects created for them) this can be done by clicking the ‘x’ in the Delete column. You can only delete a Client with time booked, by first deleting any projects linked to them. (See the Project tab).
You can view and edit the details of an existing Client by simply clicking on the appropriate row. Or click the Add Client in the tool ribbon add a new one, performing any of these actions will take you to the below page (for adding a new client, no text boxes will be filled in)
Use your browsers back button to return to the Client List, or click the Projects tab to view the projects which this client owns.
Projects
Projects was previously a subtab of the Manager tab on the old PM3time layout, and now has its own dedicated tab. It is likely that an Administrator will also use this page.
When you bill time in the Timesheet page, it is billed against a Task which in turn belongs to a Project. So a Project is essentially just a grouping of Tasks. A Project must belong to a Client.
As a minimum, you will have a Client set up for your own company for internal work. For example, you may have a Project to “Refit the computer room”. In addition, other Projects such as Admin or HR could be established to record non-chargeable or non-productive time. From the Projects list, a project manager can see any projects of which they are the manager.
You can delete any Project from the Project List. Those Projects which are in use by any User in any week, will throw up a confirmation screen before proceeding. This is because if you confirm, all time recorded against this project will be deleted as well and is not recoverable.
Projects which are not in use are deleted silently.
You can edit the Overview, Tasks, Team and Rates for an existing Project, by simply clicking on the appropriate row.
Additionally, there is a new tab at the bottom of the page that will appear regardless of the Project sub tab the user is on. It shows occasionally useful project information which is not necessarily shown on the page itself (in order to maintain a clean and simple interface). This includes Project Id and Client Id.
Existing Projects – Overview SubTab
Once you have selected any project, the overview tab will appear. You can change/update project details and then click Save (top right).
You can change the Title and ‘Your Ref’ fields, duplicate Titles or Codes are not allowed.
Project Codes are useful in that they allow you to link projects in the Timesheet system with references to Projects in other systems e.g. your invoicing or accounting systems or PM3 (from Bestoutcome). You can think of this as a “your ref” for the project.
The Project Status dropdown shows the status values in time sequence order i.e. the order in which status values will change in real time. Note: A project only becomes available for adding onto a timesheet once its status is Active.
The Original Forecast hours/ days comes by summing the forecast hours on each Task in the project. (The use of Hours or Days is defined when the Subscriber is originally set up and applies to all projects).
The Hours/Days to Completion is obtained in a similar way. If no values are entered, the field is blank – which means undefined. A value of zero implies that the task is complete.
The hours/days to date is obtained automatically by summing the time of all tasks on this Project for all people and all weeks, from the Timesheet pages.
Use the browsers back button to return to the Project List.
You can only start adding tasks to a project which already exists (i.e. has been saved). To do so, click the Tasks tab.
Existing Projects – Tasks SubTab
The tab provides information about the Tasks on a selected project.
From here you can Add a Task to the Project, and view/edit any Task. These options give access to the Task screens, which are described in 3.3 of the Project Manager Guide. Warning signs are displayed for each task that is over budget.
Contract Tracking
The main purpose of Contract Checking is to help Project Managers who run projects whose Tasks have associated billing constraints, usually stemming from a contract related to the project.
For example, the contract may have 4 items, which are entered into pm3time as tasks:
- Software purchase and installation – fixed one-off fee
- Training – 5 days at £1000 per day
- Ongoing on-site mentoring – Time and Materials at £1000 per day, as requested.
- Standard on-line Support – no charge
Project Managers need to see that contracted work is being scheduled and completed.
In addition, Project Managers want to ensure that work done is indeed billed for, at the appropriate time.
Tasks can be set as Billable or Non-billable.
- If a task is Non-billable, then the PaymentType of the task is NoCharge.
- If a task is Billable, it may have one of 3 Payment Types:
- Fixed Price
- the payment is one off; for a specified fixed amount; the bill is independent of the amount of time booked; when the task is completed, the completion date should be added to the Fixed Bill Date of the task.
- The fixed bill or charge appears only in reports or extracts (such as to Xero) where the selected time window covers the Fixed Bill Date
- Full T&M
- The payment for the time window is based on all time booked for that task, within that time window. This is how pm3time billing used to work for all billable tasks.
- Capped T&M
- For this payment type, the Budget column of the Task acts as the CAP. So any time booked above and beyond the time allocated in the Budget, will not be charged for.
- Billing takes place at regular time windows, usually monthly. We reflect this in the time window parameters on the reports page.
- The bill for a task, in a selected time window considers both the amount of time booked prior to the time window (call that P) as well as the time booked inside the time window (D). We assume that time up to the start of the time window, has already been billed. The bill for the task (for this time window period) is either
- D - the total time booked for the time window – just like full T&M, where the cap has not been exceeded.
- OR
- (Cap – P) – where the Cap has been exceeded.
- Whichever is smaller
- Fixed Price
This page has been extended to include Payment Types and fields associated with it. Only the fields which are relevant are updatable.
Since many users will not use the Contract Checking or billing facilities, these new columns can be hidden via the column selector mentioned above.
- Budget o the estimated amount of time for this task. In a contract context, this will come from the contract itself, otherwise it will just be an estimate. For Capped T&M tasks, this is also the Cap or maximum time that can be billed for.
- Actual o the amount of time booked up to the present (including today).
- Scheduled o the amount of time booked in the future – from tomorrow onwards.
- Users book time in the future, simply by going into their timesheet in the usual way, selecting the future week, and entering their time against the task. (This is quite like booking annual leave).
- If the Project Manager is using Contract Tracking, he needs to know how much future time is booked, in order to determine whether
- Work he has allocated to staff has been booked in AND whether
- He needs to allocate further work to staff in order to complete contract requirements.
- Capped T&M Date o Only relevant when PaymentType is Capped T&M
o It is populated automatically and only when Actual + Scheduled >= Budget (Cap) o It is the date after the day when booked time equals Cap (Budget);
- Fixed Bill o Only relevant if PaymentType = Fixed Price o Is the price to be paid on completion – in currency units e.g. £.
- Fixed Bill Date o This date must be set manually when this task is completed.
o Once set, the client will be billed (only) in the period whose time window covers this date.
The dropdown for PaymentType has a tooltip to remind you of what these values mean. It is important to get them right.
Person Icon
Clicking the Person icon at the far right on any Task row will open a popup which displays the Users assigned to the task by the Project Manager. In the Budget column, the Project Manager (PM) specifies how much time he is allocating to that person. For example, there may be 2 days assigned for
Configuration in the contract (see Budget field). The PM may assign part of the task to David Wilton as below but may not yet know who else will be available for the rest. On the other hand, if he over-commits people to the task, he can see the red warning icon, with the tooltip below.
People who have time booked (past or future) to one of the tasks will appear, even if the PM has not explicitly allocated that person to the task.
In the Edit Users dialog, the PM can send an email to any individual on the task, to indicate their allocation has been changed. On receipt of such an email, the recipient should book time against the task in pm3time as soon as the date is agreed with the client. The PM can then see that the recipient’s changed allocations have been actioned.
The fields – Actual, Scheduled – mean the same as in the Task summary page above. So for these fields, the value in the Task Summary is the sum of the values in the person popup associated with it. Both show what is actually booked in the timesheets. But this is not the case for Budget – since Budget on the Task is the contractual total, whereas Budget on the Person row in the popup just shows what has so far been allocated.
Estimate to Complete is populated by the PM.
You can get an overview of allocations for all tasks on the page by clicking the Print icon. This opens in the Reports tab.
Existing Projects – Team SubTab
The Team tab details access rights to the project. There are three main options:
- Grant universal access to this project
- Define individual access to this project
- Revoke all access from this project
PM3time allows the Administrator and Project Manager to determine which people can see which projects. By editing this sub-tab, you are controlling whether a person is explicitly linked to a project or not.
However, sometimes you want a project to be accessible to everyone, by default e.g. a Housekeeping project which contains tasks such as Annual Leave, Sickness, or Training. So PM3 allows you to set a project as being universally accessible (radio button “Grant Universal Access to this Project”), which removes the need for manually linking Persons individually to such projects every time someone new is added.
If it is required just to have specific users accessing the project only, a Project Manager can do this once they have been given access by an Admin, and can be done by clicking the Key icon in the tool ribbon, then selecting the checkbox for each required user in the lower table, and clicking Save.
Lastly, you may want to remove all access to a Project, because it has been put on hold or cancelled. In this, the Team subtab provides the “Remove All Access from this Project” facility. If there is a conflict between explicit access, universal access and universal removal, then the priority with highest first is: universal removal, universal access, explicit access. Bear in mind that removing all access from the project will also remove the Project Manager from the project as well, after this only an admin can reassign them to the project.
When you have finished editing, ensure you Save.
Existing Projects – Rates SubTab
The tab provides charging rate information for Persons on that particular project.
It enables you to easily see the start/ end date of each individual on the project along with their rate details and description of the services they are providing.
The buttons in the tool ribbon allow you to Show/Hide History, Add a Rate and Add users with access that are not currently listed.
5.3. Tasks
Tasks was previously a subtab of the Manager tab on the old PM3time layout, and now has its own dedicated tab that only Admins can access. It displays all tasks assigned to all projects in pm3time. By filtering this list you can see the Tasks for a specific Client / Project.
A Project is divided into Tasks to allow time to be recorded at a more detailed level. These Tasks may correspond to (key) milestones on a project plan and so allow comparison of Budgeted and Actual time and resource spent on each milestone. However, there is no requirement for this correspondence. You can choose whatever tasks you like. The project manager may wish to record time simply against each of the major phases of the project e.g. Phase 1, Phase 2 etc.
Tasks can be added using the Add Task button in the Tool Ribbon, which will present a screen displaying all the fields required to be filled in to add a task.
The Task Code field automatically generates a value after typing in the Task Name box and deselecting, which you can use or overwrite as you require. Task Codes are useful in that they allow you to link tasks in the Timesheet system with references to Tasks or Milestones in other systems.
You can delete any Task from the Task List which does not have time recorded against it. Those Projects which are in use by any User in any week will display an information dialog explaining why the deletion is not allowed. Tasks which are not in use are deleted silently.
It is on this screen that the Original Forecast hours/days and the Hours/days to Completion for a task can be set. The latter field would be updated frequently, say weekly, and does not automatically equal (Original Forecast minus Actual), because often times the Original Forecast is inaccurate, for a number of realistic reasons. So the Hours/Days to Completion, though an estimate, serves as a good measure (with the Hours/Days to Date) of the overrun of a task.
You may also set an expenditure type on a task using the expenditure type dropdown. To set up values for use in the expenditure type dropdown, please see the Admin > Customisation page.