From Tech Solutions Documentation

While time registration is the income driver of many project based organizations very often this process is either badly implemented or neglected. Collecting excel sheets at the end of the month and manually creating overviews for invoicing is an error prone and frustrating task, let alone if the project manager has to finish the job with an argument with the customer about spent hours.

From an user perspective time registration can be a bureaucratic task that only eats billable time. Either (s)he has to keep track of already sent excel sheets or the time tracking tool is too complex with 8-digit project ID's, work type ID's all set in a mainframe environment.

eHour tries to make time registration as easy as possible for the user by providing a user-friendly web interface without the need to remember all sort of id's and clear reporting on how many hours were already booked in the past.

Project managers and the administration department have a full overview of what's going on with their projects or all projects globally.

Contents 1 eHour Overview 1.1 Structure 1.2 Departments, Users and Roles 1.3 Customers, Projects and Project Managers 1.4 Project Assignments 2 Getting Started

eHour Overview

Structure

Without further ado here is the overall structure of eHour. Each section is explained further on in this documentation.

A user is part of a department and can have multiple roles (User, Administrator, Reporter). A customer can have multiple projects. Projects are assigned to an user. There are three types of assignments (on date, fixed time allotted and flex time allotted). With the assignments in places an user can book hours on it, in other words Timesheet entries.

Departments, Users and Roles

Departments represent departments or teams within your organization. An user can be part of a single department.

Each user can have one or more roles, you assign them when creating or editing and user:

The basic role is the 'User' role. The user role can book hours on projects and get reporting on the hours (s)he booked in the past on projects.

The second role is the 'Report' role'. users with the 'report' role can view reports of all customers, projects and users. If someone has only a 'report' role he/she can only view reports, not book hours.

The third role is the 'Admin' role. Administrators can create customers, users, assign roles to users, create customers, create projects and assign projects to users. They also can change global configuration parameters such as whether to display hourly rates and turnover.

'Project Manager' is the fourth role. Project Manager is an implicit role as in that you can't assign it to an user when creating the user. More about the Project Manager role in the Projects sections.

An user can either be active or inactive. For the sake of reporting it's not possible to delete users but you can de-activate them. Deactivated customers cannot login but hours they booked in the past still appear on the reports.

Customers, Projects and Project Managers

Everything revolves around customers. Each customer has a name, a unique customer code and a description. A customer can be de-activated. When a customer is de-actived users can't book hours on the customers' projects anymore however the customer still appears on the reports. Customers without projects can be deleted.

Every customer can have one or more projects. Projects have the same attributes as a customer: a name, unique project code and a description. Additionaly you can add the customers' contact person to the project and assign a project manager within your own organization.

The project manager can only do reporting for projects he's project manager for. He also receives e-mail when an user books more hours than allotted. For this e-mail functionality only users who have a filled-out e-mail address can be assigned project manager.

As with customers and users, projects can be de-activated. No more hours can be booked but it's still on the reports.

There's one last last attribute which is interesting and that's the 'Default project' setting. When a project is marked as a default project new users are automatically assigned to it. If you want to keep track of vacation days; create a customer representing your own organization and create a project called 'Vacational leave' and make it a default project. Now every new user that's created can book hours on 'Vacational leave' without an administrator having to assign him/her manually. Default project assignments don't have an hourly rate and the start and end date is infinite.

Project Assignments

To allow a user to book hours on a project he first needs to be assigned to a project. In the assignment you can define the hourly rate, role and start and end date. This way each user can have a different hourly rate within the same project and a different start/end date depending on the phase the project is in. There are three different types of assignments: date range assignment, fixed time allotted and flex time allotted assignments.

• Date Range assignment

The date range assignment is the simplest form of an assignment. You define a start and end date and the user can book as many hours within that range as he needs to. A start or end date is not required, if you leave the end date out and just specify a start date the user can book hours as of the start date until infinity.

• Fixed Time Allotted assignment

The second type is the fixed time allotted assignment. With this type you define how many hours can be booked on this project by the user. Say you give/allot 300 hours on a project to an user, when the user reaches that mark he cannot book any more hours on the project. When the allotted mark is reached a warning mail is sent to the Project Manager informing him that the user reached the mark (therefore only users created with a valid e-mail address can be assigned as PM). You can further limit this assignment by adding a start or end date or both.

• Flex Time Allotted assignment

The last type is the flex time allotted assignment. The difference with the previous assignment is that on top of the allotted hours an additional 'overrun' can be specified. If an user has 200 allotted hours on a project and he books 200 hours an e-mail will be sent to the PM. However if an overrun of 80 hours is given he can book an additional 80 hours on the project. When those 80 hours are spent a second warning mail is sent to the PM and the user can't book any hours anymore on the project.

Getting Started

A default admin account was created when you installed the database scripts. Login with username admin and password admin.
First change the global configuration to match your needs. After logging in click on configuration. Change the From address and SMTP server so that mail can be sent. After updating the configuration it's time to create some users and projects.

Users are organized into departments so you need to create a department first. In the administration section, create a department by clicking on Departments and fill out the form on the right. Choose a descriptive name and a short code, for example IT or HR.

Now that you've created a department you can add users to it. Click on Users and fill out the required fields. Each user can have one (or more) of the following roles:

• Consultant's can track hours
• Administrator rights gives access to the admin section: add/remove users, departments, customers & projects
• The Report Role gives access to global reporting where you can get aggregate reporting on all customers and users

Don't forget to change the default password for the admin account. To do so, locate the Admin user in the list of users and click on it to edit. Fill out a new password in the form. Now that you've created the users it's time to define the customers. Click on Customers to add some customers.

You cannot assign a user directly to a customer, you have to create a project first. When adding a project you see your previously created customer appear in the dropdown. A project can only have on customer (one customer however can of course have multiple projects).

With the customers, projects and users in place you can now assign users to a project. Click on assignments.

First you need to select the user you want to assign a project to. After you've selected the user you can assign him/her to a project by filling in the description (Developer/project manager/etc), hourly rate and start and end date. When you've added the project assignment you'll see it appear in the list above the form.

Congratulations, the first user can now track time for this project! For full documentation on the features, check out the documentation on the eHour site.