Get your team, invite the client and add your projects. This is where all starts.
Management – The magic starts where Clients, Employees and Projects meet.
It’s mandatory to keep a detailed track of your company projects, employees, documents and clients. Have all the information under one roof, there’s no need to keep track of the same thing in multiple apps. Keep the employee’s (or even contractors) skills, vacation days, rates and all the other details.
On the project side, apart from the usual things – such as type (time and material or fixed price, budget, team definition, approval workflow etc.), you can even have different rates per roles.
And as a bonus, you can see the profitability of your resources by comparing the employee’s rates with the rates you are getting from the projects they are involved in.
People, the ones who make it all happen.
It’s time to add all your employees (including those who won’t have access in the tool, the “unlicensed” users), your contractors and also contacts from client companies if you wish so. If you grant access to people from outside your company, a company ID can be set so that you can differentiate them from the internal users. And just in case you’re bad with memorizing faces, you can also upload a profile photo.
But just adding people randomly into the tool isn’t quite efficient, especially if you have a higher number of employees; therefore, you might find it useful to have them grouped in departments/teams.
Some general settings can be made also, like access level, visibility in the planner, timesheet allocations view, tasks or allocations freeze and leave requests approval setting; it is important to choose carefully as all these individual settings will be reflected in the user’s timesheet.
More details on people are always better for the business!
The employee’s profile is quite complex, as, besides general information like name, job title, contact data, it also includes financial and administrative details such as payment type (paid by hour, daily or monthly), hourly rate (very important detail when you want to calculate the employee’s profitability), working time, location or employment date. In case your employees are located in different countries, you have the possibility to introduce their salaries with the currencies of the respective countries.
It’s important to add the skills too in the employee’s profile as it might come in handy when you make the allocations on current projects or for accurate forecasts. Why? Because you might have 50 Software Developers in your company, but do they all have that specific skill that you need for your project, like Pearl programming for instance? And since the most probably the answer here is “no”, adding skills to people is really effective.
After introducing all people, you’ll have a general overview with access level, license status, hourly/monthly rate, allocated and logged hours on projects.
Clients, bring them on!
The clients are next important thing for your company, as they bring in the money. And since projects can’t exist in the absence of clients and in elapseit tool all projects have to be linked to a client, that’s what you should focus on, after introducing people in the tool. To complete a client’s profile, you need to add some general details like name, address, country and some financial data such as registration number, VAT number, bank and account number, invoice due days.
Feel free to add a company logo too. And to make it easier for you and not to look in more places for business cards, you can add here all contacts you have in that company; this might come in handy especially if you want to allow your clients to check the project’s update and it will not bound either of you on fixed meetings for current status discussions. And in case you don’t have a client code, elapseit will automatically generate one for each introduced company. Pretty simple, right?
Projects broken down to the last detail.
The project profile should be the last one you fill in in the Management module, because, as you’ll see, you need input not only from clients’ profile, but also from people’s profile.
As you guessed already, there are some general details that must be filled in, like project name, client, start and end date or status (there are six status types to choose from); you can also add a description, but it’s not mandatory. There’s also some billing information you have to fill in; you may have clients with whom you agree an hourly/daily rate or clients with whom you agree upon a fixed fee, regardless the number of worked hours; having a special remote rate is also possible. Introducing these financial details are very important if you want to check your employees’ profitability for example. And there’s one tiny little detail in the Project profile which will make the difference when calculating the profitability: project role rate! Why? Because in the People profile you introduce the employees’ hourly/daily rate agreed in the working contract, but you can allocate them on projects with different roles that have different hourly rates. So, make sure you know exactly what’s the profit from your employees’ work by introducing complete highly accurate data!
Budget and expenses details can be introduced together with the invoicing currency. As in the people profile, you can set planner and timesheet visibility or to block hours and tasks on the project. Then you should decide whether an approval workflow is necessary for logged hours and who can log hours on the project. The next step is to appoint a Project Manager and set the project team and the hourly rate for each role in the team. Job titles/roles and skills can be added too.